BIO: Sandell Morse holds a Master’s Degree in Liberal Studies with a concentration in the Humanities from Dartmouth College and a Master’s Degree in English with a concentration in fiction writing from the University of New Hampshire. She has taught at the University of New Hampshire and at the University of Maine, Farmington. She facilitates both fiction and nonfiction workshops for the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance and for the New Hampshire Writers’ Project.

This photo is from a trip I took with the daughter to the Maryland Science Center. Marie Howe—who is coming to read at American University in DC on October 27th—wrote a poem in which the speaker hurries the daughter along and then wonders why she’s doing that. I find myself in that position (hurry, hurry) and really why am I hurrying so often? When the daughter wanted to stop and watch one of the dinner cruise ships move away from the harbor, I stood there patiently. Okay, maybe I wasn’t the most patient, yet I did not tell her to hurry. We watched every single thing they did to move the boat, and I took many deep breaths.

In this photo, she was running towards dessert. Although it was cold, we resisted the end of summer with a last Italian ice at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. Now…on to crackling leaves and fires.

Morse has penned ten haikus in total, and placed them all over the Metro Atlanta area. You can find a map of all the locations here. Saying that these signs, read by almost everyone in a quick glance in traffic or on the bus, offers ‘an ideal place for poetry’, Morse aims to make ‘compact observations and commentary on modern life’. My personal favorite packs a ton of poignancy into just seventeen syllables:

CASH 4 YOUR OLD GOLD

The Value of Memories

Measured by+ the Ounce

Still, it seems that not everyone is a fan of the public poetry. Speaking to Atlanta’s wsbtv.com Peggy Denby from Keep Atlanta Beautiful said, “We call signs like this, ‘litter on a stick’”.+ This is not empty griping, either. Flux Projects, the arts program sponsoring Morse’s poetry signs, has been notified of the illegality of the signs and advised to take them down. Fines for the offense range from $50 to $1,000.

Such controversy can only lead to more attention for the project—and maybe even inspire some copycat signs!

What do you think? Are unauthorized signs always litter? Or does art have a higher law?

You can find out more about the roadside haiku project with a video from John Morse here.

The 2nd Annual Blue Flower Arts Winter Writers’ Conference is January 9 – 15, 2011. Hosted by Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, featuring Nick Flynn in memoir; Mark Doty in poetry; and Mary Gaitskill in fiction.

Applicants may register with one of the faculty, and participants will be selected on a first-come, first-served basis, with a limit of 12 positions available with each faculty member. The schedule offers daily 2.5 hour workshops in the mornings, with afternoons of open studio time for writing, as well as craft discussions on a range of topics. Evenings are set aside for readings by the faculty, a special guest reading by Paul Lisicky, and an open mic event where participants can share their work. Also on offer are individual 30-minute conferences with your chosen faculty. All faculty readings are free and open to the public.

Please visit www.bfawwc.com for more information.

Atlantic Center for the Arts

1414 Art Center Avenue, New Smyrna Beach, Florida

Information: 386.427.6975, ext. 16

www.bfawwc.com

FACULTY BIOS
Mark Doty, the only American poet to have won Great Britain’s T. S. Eliot Prize, is the author of six books of poems. The first, Turtle, Swan, appeared in 1987. His third collection, My Alexandria (1993), received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Since then he has published Atlantis (1995); Sweet Machine (1998); Source (2001); and the critically acclaimed volume of poems, School of the Arts (2005), HarperCollins. In 2008, Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems was published, and won the National Book Award for 2008. He is the author of three memoirs: Heaven’s Coast (1996), Firebird (1999), and Dog Years (2007). His interest in the visual arts is evident not only in his poems but also in his book-length essay “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon” (2001).

Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (Norton, 2004), won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir, and has been translated into thirteen languages. He is also the author of two books of poetry, Some Ether (Graywolf, 2000), which won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and Blind Huber (Graywolf, 2002). His newest book, a memoir entitled The Ticking is the Bomb: A Memoir of Bewilderment was recently released by Norton. He has been awarded fellowships from The Guggenheim Foundation, The Library of Congress, The Amy Lowell Trust, and The Fine Arts Work Center. Some of the venues his poems, essays and non-fiction have appeared in include The New Yorker, the Paris Review, National Public Radio’s “This American Life,” and The New York Times Book Review. He worked as a “field poet” and as an artistic collaborator on the film “Darwin’s Nightmare,” which was nominated for an Academy Award for best feature documentary in 2006. One semester a year, he teaches at the University of Houston and spends the rest of the year elsewhere.

Awarding-winning author Mary Gaitskill is best known for delivering powerful stories of dislocation, longing, and desire with prose that “glides lightly over unsoundable depths” [Village Voice]. She is the author of the novels Two Girls, Fat and Thin, and Veronica, which was nominated for the 2005 National Book Award, National Critic’s Circle Award, and L.A. Times Book Award. She is the author of the story collections Bad Behavior and Because They Wanted To, which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner in 1998. Bad Behavior, now a classic, made critical waves when it was first published, heralding Gaitskill’s arrival on the literary scene and established her as one of the sharpest, erotically charged, and audaciously funny writing talents of contemporary literature. Her newest collection of stories is titled Don’t Cry (2009): “Written with her distinctive, uncanny combination of bluntness and high lyricism, Don’t Cry takes its place among artworks of great moral seriousness.” [Bomb Magazine]

Special Guest reading by Paul Lisicky:

Paul Lisicky is the author of Lawnboy and Famous Builder, both published by Graywolf Press, and the forthcoming novel, The Burning House (Etruscan Press, 2011) and set of short prose pieces, Unbuilt Projects (Four Way Books, 2012). Recent work appears in Five Points, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, Subtropics, The Seattle Review, The Pinch, and in the anthologies Truth in Nonfiction and Naming the World. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Henfield Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a Winter Fellow. He has taught in the graduate writing programs at Cornell University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Antioch University Los Angeles. He currently teaches at NYU and in the low residency MFA program at Fairfield University. He lives in New York City. His website is http://www.paullisicky.com/.

Her list is below — click on it for the whole list — and I’m going to add some of my own items:

• Luna Bars — preferably Peppermint
• Running shoes
• Noise machine to block out people who party later than you do
• Deck of cards for poker
• Change for poker
• Your laptop
• Hiking shoes and good socks
• Extra paper and pens
• Actual real money — just in case
• Bourbon
• Books — I know, I know. What writer doesn’t pack books?
• Stamps
• Envelopes

No matter how thoroughly you plan, at some point you’ll find yourself wishing for something you left at home. Maybe this list will help you pack for a writers conference.

1) Small bedside reading lamp. Not only does it make for a more pleasant atmosphere than an overhead light, it will also allow you to read yourself to sleep.

2) Outside by CB I Hate Perfume, tested against Sewanee mosquitos by fiction writer Sharon Mauldin Reynolds. No one wants to smell like DEET at a writers conference.

3) Wristwatch. Cell phones can be out of range, out of charge, turned off or left back in your room.

Dim Sum in Silver Spring, MD

About three years ago, several us went into dim sum comas from the amazing dim sum at Oriental East in Silver Spring, MD. See that link for a photo of two good-looking men and one adorable child (not mine).

This past weekend had me out with my San Diego friend for one — perhaps final — DC hurrah. Now that said friend’s sister has graduated and her husband has graduated, it looks like I’ll have to get myself and some other selves out to San Diego. Oh, the agony to visit California. I’m suffering at the thought of it. Yeah.

Thanks to C. Dale Young for telling me about Skymiles, because I’ve taken one free trip to CA in first class and hope to take another next year. Oh, to be in first class with a newborn! It was devilishly fun to see the expressions on people’s faces as they must have expected her to scream, cry or otherwise freak out. She did not.

And here. And there. I’ve not even talked in detail about the dim sum. What I eat at dim sum is beyond me. I prefer the savory. If it has scallions, that is good. If it’s crunchy, that is good. The daughter branched out and ate a lemon-like Chinese pudding or custard despite her declaration that she doesn’t like Chinese food.

Thank goodness for the coffee shop down the street. Somehow the bitter coffee cuts through all that dim sum grease and prevents me from turning into a grease puddle right then and there.

Do I keep it to myself forever? Do I make it into art?

Writing about this particular experience is difficult because it happened too recently and also because I don’t know that it’s respectful to write about. It’s not an experience many people have. Those that do would probably appreciate reading a poem about it.

It’s not like me to “overthink” (yes, one word) the creation of a poem, yet here I am. One part of my brain says it’s a beautiful moment in some ways. Another part of my brain asks, “how could you even consider writing about this?”

I don’t know what to do.

BITS

During my conference, I learned — among other things — that a completely unsexy business such as dumpsters can be made to be fun and profitable.

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Work continues on the latest 32 Poems. I’m making up for lost time in some areas to get this out asap.

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My friend checking her cell phone.

Here is my back. I am drinking iced tea and am the woman of mystery since you can’t see my face:

Talking with the lawyer-accountant for Marillion – a nice Aussie. I’m learning some Aussie by the way.

Here I am gesticulating wildly while my partner falls asleep (That guy next to my sleeping partner is pretty cool. Behind him is copywriter extraordinaire, Harlan Kilstein):